Elaine de Kooning

Elaine Fried was born on March 12, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a household that encouraged her early interest in art. She studied at Hunter College before transferring to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, where she met the painter Willem de Kooning; the two married in 1943. Working within the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism's first generation, she distinguished her painting from many of her peers by keeping the human figure, rendering landscapes, portraits, and later cave-painting and bull motifs with the same gestural spontaneity that defined the movement's abstraction. She held her first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1952 and was included in the Museum of Modern Art's traveling exhibition Young American Painters from 1956 to 1958.

Her most significant commission came in 1962, when she was chosen to paint a portrait of President John F. Kennedy for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. Given Kennedy's restlessness as a sitter, de Kooning was selected in part for her ability to work quickly; she held seven informal sittings with him in Palm Beach, Florida, between December 1962 and January 1963, and produced hundreds of preparatory sketches along with 23 finished paintings before Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 brought the project to a halt. Beyond painting, de Kooning wrote regularly for ARTnews and taught at Yale University, Pratt Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University. She moved her home and studio to East Hampton, New York, in 1975. A longtime smoker, she had a lung removed after a cancer diagnosis and died of lung cancer on February 1, 1989, at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, New York.

De Kooning's critical standing has risen substantially as part of a broader reassessment of the women who shaped Abstract Expressionism alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Krasner. For much of her career she was read primarily in relation to Willem de Kooning, but curators and critics have increasingly separated her contribution: her insistence on figuration inside an abstract, gestural language, her prolific work as a portraitist of artists and public figures, and her writing for ARTnews, which shaped how the movement itself was described in real time. The National Portrait Gallery's 2015 exhibition Elaine de Kooning: Portraits, her first major solo exhibition in twenty years, was a turning point in presenting her as an independent artistic figure, with the Kennedy portraits as its centerpiece.

Elaine de Kooning's estate has no single representing gallery on record; her work has been handled at various points by galleries including Michael Rosenfeld and Rago, and appears at the major auction houses within their post-war and contemporary sales. Auction volume is low, consistent with a limited supply of paintings and a market still catching up to her critical reassessment. Her auction high is Charge, which sold for USD 1,071,000 at Sotheby's New York on November 14, 2022, a modest figure set against the multi-million-dollar range now common for her Abstract Expressionist peers, including her husband.

De Kooning's market is defined by low supply and low auction velocity rather than weak demand: institutions hold much of her strongest work, and her paintings appear at auction far less often than her critical reputation would suggest. There is no catalogue raisonne, and authentication runs through the Elaine de Kooning House and the Archives of American Art rather than a formal estate authentication board, so provenance and exhibition history carry extra weight in evaluating a work. Her Abstract Expressionist canvases from the 1950s and her figurative portraits, particularly any tied to the Kennedy sittings, are the categories most likely to draw institutional and academic interest.